Copy and Compose - Sentences€¦ · Web view6. 2 Tricolon. 7. 3 Asyndeton. 8. 4 Polysyndeton. 9. 5 Synonymia and Congeries. 10. 6 Merismos. 11. 7 Antithesis. 12. 8 Antimetabole

Copy and Compose (revised 1.22.19)

1 ISOCOLON 62 TRICOLON 73 ASYNDETON 84 POLYSYNDETON 95 SYNONYMIA AND CONGERIES 106 MERISMOS 117 ANTITHESIS 128 ANTIMETABOLE 139 ANTANAGOGE 1410 ANTISAGOGE 1511 HORISMOS 1612 EXEMPLUM 1713 PROSAPODOSIS 1814 PARADIASTOLE 1915 SYNOIKEIOSIS 2016 AUXESIS 2117 ANAPHORA 2218 EPISTROPHE 2319 SYMPLOCE 2420 ANADIPLOSIS 2521 CONDUPLICATIO 2622 EPANALEPSIS 2723 POLYPTOTON 2824 DIACOPE 2925 EPIZEUXIS 3026 PLOCE OR ANTANACLASIS 3127 SCESIS ONOMATON 3228 ZEUGMA 3329 DIAZEUGMA 3430 PROZEUGMA 3531 MESOZEUGMA 3632 HYPOZEUGMA 3733 SYLLEPSIS 3834 ANASTROPHE 3935 METANOIA 4036 APPOSITIVE 4137 PARENTHESIS 4238 METABASIS 4339 PROCATALEPSIS 4440 PARALEPSIS 4541 HYPOPHORA 4642 EROTESIS 4743 IRONY 4844 MEIOSIS 4945 LITOTES 5046 HYPERBOLE 51

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47 SIMILE 5248 ANALOGY 5349 METAPHOR 5450 CATACHRESIS 5551 METONYMY 5652 SYNECHDOCHE 5753 ETHOPOEIA 5854 PROSOPOPOEIA 5955 CHARACTERISMUS 6056 APOSTROPHE 6157 HYPALLAGE 6258 THE COMPLEX FIGURATIVE SENTENCE 6359 PAROMOION 6460 THE RHYTHMICAL SENTENCE 6561 THE METRICAL SENTENCE (FOUR BEATS) 6662 THE METRICAL SENTENCE (VARIED BEATS) 6763 THE MASTER SENTENCE 6864 THE MASTER SENTENCE 6965 THE MASTER SENTENCE 7066 The Master Sentence 71

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Liberally adapted from Copy and Compose, A Guide to Prose Style by Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester (Prentice-Hall, 1969).

Chapter 2: Stylistic Sentences (rhetorical schemes and tropes)

A stylistic sentence is a basic sentence modified or transformed to produce some special effect. Having learned to write a great many basic sentences, you are now ready to practice transforming your basic sentences in order that you may more powerfully expand your repertoire of rhetorical maneuvers available to you in a given writing situation.

Stylistic sentences can do a number of things for you: They can help establish emphasis; they can indicate climaxes; they can provide variation within a plain and common style; and they can help establish and maintain an elaborate and eventful literary style. In general, they can assist you in your manipulation of stylistic intensity.

If you were to write using only basic sentences, you would not be writing poorly, but you would probably not be writing as effectively as possible. If you were to paint only with primary colors, perhaps you would not paint so colorfully and flexibly as you might if you mixed these primary colors to get secondary ones. Stylistic sentences are like secondary colors: They are the more subtle, at times even more exotic, hues that the skilled artist employs.

Clifton Fadiman once wrote, “Purely purposive prose can become so dull as to fail of its purpose, which first of all presupposes the engagement of the attention.” Stylistic sentences are especially geared to engage the actual reader’s attention and bring them to enter into readerly roles beyond their current understanding. Indeed, the stylistic sentence might be called the noticeable sentence, for it not only communicates with the reader but also begins to intrigue them by the very way it is put together.

By mastering the various forms of stylistic sentences, you will be able to intrigue your reader, to engage their attention to the extent that seems best at any given time. On certain occasions you may wish your writing to be low-keyed, rather plain, but on other occasions you may wish to make it highly eventful, elaborate—even unusual. In between these two possibilities there are, of course, numerous shadings and gradations of stylistic intensity that you can establish. With the proper use of stylistic sentences along with basic sentences, you can usually produce the tone and manner that you have in mind. As you increase the number of stylistic sentences in your writing, you will increase the elaborateness and eventfulness of your prose. And, as you will soon discover, stylistic sentences themselves differ in their degrees of intensity: Some are more elaborate and eventful than others.

A stylistic sentence may be engendered from a basic sentence in various ways: by altering the basic sequence of words and their syntax; by introducing elements of design and pattern; by interrupting the normal flow of the sentence; and by adding repetitions, metaphors, alliterations, and various rhythms. Indeed, you will find many, many ways to construct stylistic sentences, many of these ways so well established in the art of composition that they have definite (and ancient!) technical names, names you may wish to learn when they are presented.

As you practice the various stylistic sentences given on the following pages, keep in mind that they are to be used in conjunction with basic sentences. Remember, that if you are to write well, you must always draw from the full spectrum of sentence types— both basic and stylistic. No one sentence form, no one group of sentence types, is better than another. Good writing is usually eclectic. Your goal is to build as large a repertoire as possible.

As you did in your study of basic sentences, copy the model sentence:“Our automatic response is stronger than our intellectual awareness.”E. H. Gombrich; Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art

and then write a similarly-constructed sentence of your own:“My unlimited expenses are always greater than my restricted income.”

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1 Isocolonparallel structured sentence (Forsyth chapter 19; Harris chapter 1)

“An event may seem to us amusing or pathetic.” Joseph Wood Krutch, Experience and Art

“He who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life.” Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith

“If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is essential.” G. K. Chesterton, Heretics

“The room was solid and rich; it was established and quiet.” Robert Allen Durr, The Last Days of H. L. Mencken

When writing basic sentences, you may create units of various lengths; but, on certain occasions, you can, if you wish, take care to see that the units are the same length, are equalized into a definite architecture. Such a structure, having units that are the same length, is called an isocolon. With equal-length units, a series becomes more noticeable, more controlled, and more emphatic.

When only two units are involved, the resulting equal-length structure is called a balance. The balance may consist of two words, as “amusing” and “pathetic” in Joseph Wood Krutch s sentence; or of longer units, as the phrases in Tillich’s sentence— the sphere of faith” and “the sanctuary of life”; or even of clauses, as in Chesterton’s sentence. In the Chesterton example the entire sentence is involved in the balance and represents the most controlled structural form a writer can achieve with a two-part series.

Whenever you write a sentence, if you can add a dimension of perfect structure and architecture by using units of equal size, you will make your writing more noticeable and eventful—an effect you will desire when your rhetorical profile calls for some degree of heightening.

Copy three sentences from the above; then compose sentences of your own in which you balance first two individual words, then two independent clauses, and then two prepositional phrases used as adjectives.

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2 Tricolonthe three-part structured sentence (Forsyth chapter 16)

“He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man.” Thomas Jefferson, A letter on the character of George Washington

“Creation, property, enjoyment form a sinister trinity in the human mind.” E. M. Forster, My Wood

“All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.” —J. Robert Oppenheimer, Prospects in the Arts and Sciences

“To conceal wit with the mask of folly is the art of the jester.” –Arthur Schopenhauer

One of the most frequently used forms of the structured series is the tricolon—a three-part series with units of equal length. The tricolon is always dramatic, and it has been used for such grandiose announcements as Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” and Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The tricolon effects a dramatic presentation of the reasonable and judicious position; and perhaps for that reason, it is one of the most popular stylistic constructions. Jefferson has an exact tricolon in “a wise,” “a good,” and “a great.” Forster has an exact tricolon with his three trisyllabic words, “creation,” “property,” and “enjoyment.”

Because the tricolon is so effective a device of rhetoric and style, it can be overused; therefore, a writer should keep in mind the distinctions between two-part, three-part, and four-part series in general, and if he decides to use the three-part series, he should make sure he wants the series given the extra emphasis and attention that the tricolon will confer.

Copy the two sentences above; then compose two sentences of your own in which you use the tricolon.

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3 Asyndeton Words, phrases, clauses, separated by commas, no conjunctions (Forsyth chapter 11; Harris chapter 2)

“He has had his intuition, he has made his discovery, he is eager to explore it, to reveal it, to fix it down.” Joyce Carey, Art and Reality

“We hear the hum of life in the fields; a horse champs his bit; a butterfly circles and settles.” Virginia Woolf, The Novels of Turgenev

You can stylistically modify any series, whatever its length, by manipulating the conjunctions within the series. You usually write a series with one conjunction, which comes between the last and next-to-the-last items. If you omit that conjunction, you have employed the device of asyndeton, and your series is pushed together into a more definite, single event or action of condition: The sense of time is speeded up and you have given your reader the impression that what you are talking about is one event occurring all-at-once.

In the sentence by Joyce Carey and the sentence by Virginia Woolf, you can anticipate the difference in effect if a conjunction had been used: “He has had his intuition, he has made his discovery, and he is eager to explore it, to reveal it, and to fix it down,” and “We hear the hum of life in the fields; a horse champs his bit; and a butterfly circles and settles.” With the conjunction the sentences are more ordinary; without it they are more compressed, more instantaneous, and more dramatic.

Copy these two sentences; then compose two sentences of your own containing asyndeton.

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4 Polysyndetonemploying a multitude of conjunctions (Forsyth chapter 11; Harris chapter 2)

“It was a hot day and the sky was very bright and blue and the road was white and dusty.” Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” William Faulkner, Nobel Prize speech, 1950

The opposite of asyndeton is polysyndeton: an abundant use of conjunctions in a series. Polysyndeton enables you to stretch what you are saying out over a longer piece of time and enables you to distinguish each item of a series from its companions: Polysyndeton separates, each item of a series into a distinct or discrete experience.

Hemingway is famous for his use of polysyndeton; and Faulkner, in this sentence from his well-known Nobel Prize speech, makes tremendously effective use of polysyndeton in conjunction with a long series. Faulkner is calling attention to the human and the emotional, but the virtues he lists are not simply those of a single moment (if they were, asyndeton would have been used), but these virtues persist through the “glory of the past” into the present moment.

Copy the above two sentences; then compose two similar sentences in which you use many conjunctions to indicate an extension of experience over a long period of time and to indicate the distinct identity of each item in the series.

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5 Synonymia and Congeriesmulti-part structured sentence (using a multitude of words or phrases or clauses to express similarity or difference), where one thing is said in many ways (Forsyth chapter 37)

“Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him.” Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review of Crocker’s Edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson

“London was hideous, vicious, cruel and above all overwhelming.” Henry James, Italian Hours

“They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers”

“There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the public.” William Hazlitt, On Living for One’s Self

Synonymia and congeries are species of synathroismos: in synonymia, the words and expressions are similar; in congeries they are different, and in their profusion amplify what is being said. In either case, both may have units of approximately the same length; indeed, any series can be so structured. In the first sentence above, Macaulay presents four one-word units in his series; and, while the first two words are polysyllabic and the last two words are monosyllabic, the sense of exact structure prevails. Not only does Macaulay’s series connote, because of its four items, “the human being,” but because of its carefully structured one-two-three-four sequence, the series is given special importance, particular emphasis. Macaulay, indeed, would seem to be saying that not only are these the characteristics that sophisticated human beings put into their writing but also that these characteristics should not be overlooked or ignored.

Copy the sentences above; then compose sentences of your own in which the units in a four-part or even a five-part series are of approximately the same length.

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6 Merismosdistributio--laying out all the parts of a matter distinctly, leaving the matter (the whole) itself unsaid (Forsyth chapter 4)

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s what you know that you know, what you know that you don’t know, and what you don’t know that you don’t know.

There are three possible places you might be right now. Some of you are ready to put down your deposit and register, and you should go do that right now. Some of you are a definite “no”; I thank you for your time and the attention you gave me this evening. The rest of you might be in a place called “I really want to do this, but I don’t have the time and the money”; the next thing I say is meant just for you.

In his article “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audience,” Peter J. Rabinowitz distinguishes four audience roles: one is the actual audience, second is the authorial audience, the third is the narrative audience, and the fourth is the ideal narrative audience.

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7 Antithesis contrary qualities juxtaposed, often in an isocolon (Forsyth chapter 3; Harris chapter 1)

“The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.” George Santayana, Reason in Society

“Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote.” Daniel Webster, Eulogy on Adams and Jefferson

From Rhetorica Ad Herennium:“Flattery has pleasant beginnings, but also brings on bitterest endings.”

“To enemies you show yourself conciliatory, to friends inexorable.”

Extreme tension can be achieved in sentences by presenting balanced elements in direct opposition to each other. A balance of opposites is called an antithesis, and it is one of the most popular of the intensifying devices in style. Antithesis may be especially useful to you when you wish to emphasize discrepancies and contrasts, or wish to magnify unlikely relationships.

Santayana, in his sentence, has used antithesis to emphasize the relationship between the seen and the unseen parts of a structure; he has achieved intensification by balancing both his adjectives and nouns. Daniel Webster, in turn, has used a series of antitheses, not only to suggest the totality of his conviction, but also to suggest that this totality takes into consideration all polarities and that his conviction is so firm that it will survive whatever the circumstances.

Copy these antithetical sentences; then compose two of your own. In your second sentence use a series of antitheses as Daniel Webster did.

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8 Antimetabolechiasmus: the sentence of transposed terms, often in the form of isocolon (Forsyth chapter 24; Harris chapters 1 and 13)

“Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“But to take the gamble out of the game, to try to make winning a dead certainty, is to achieve a certainty which is indeed dead.” Allan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

“You can take the cowboy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the cowboy.” Message on a T-shirt

“The early part of life should teach us to harden what is soft within us, and the latter part should teach us to soften what has become hard.” Sidney Harris, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

From Rhetorica Ad Herennium:“When all is calm, you are confused; when all is in confusion, you are calm.”

“In a situation requiring all your coolness, you are on fire; in one requiring all your ardour, you are cool.”

“When there is need for you to be silent, you are uproarious; when you should speak, you grow mute.”

“I do not write poems, because I cannot write the sort I wish, and I do not wish to write the sort I can.”

An even more elaborate form of intensification occurs in a two-part series when two elements constitute one part of a balance and are then reversed to compose the second part of a balance. In Orwell’s sentence we see that “thought . . . language” becomes “language . . . thought.” This reversal of parts in a balance, involving exact words, is called antimetabole. It is, of course, a powerfully intense construction and, as such, is used only on rare occasions.

Copy three sentences containing antimetabole; then compose three similar sentences.

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9 Antanagogethe negative-positive sequenced sentence

“A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.” Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper

“He suddenly saw the fields, not as solid flat objects covered with grass or useful crops and dotted with trees, but as colour in astonishing variety and subtlety of gradation.” Joyce Carey, Art and Reality

Many times you may present a two-part series in a negative-positive form: “not this, but that.” Presenting not only the certainty of a two-part series but presenting it in so definite a no/yes or black/white version, you can create a particular and exceptional tension.

Such negative-positive two-part series are effectively used when you wish to communicate certainty—and at the same time wish to give the second part of the series special importance. By presenting the negative, the positive becomes even stronger. By presenting the negative, you suggest that you are not only “certain” but also that you are taking into consideration any contrary argument, in order that your “certainty” will become imperative.

Consider how different Krutch’s sentence would have been if he had written, “A tragic writer may be an atheist, but he must believe in man.” The absoluteness of the two-part series would have remained, but a certain forcefulness would be lost. An additional degree of intensity was added to the sentence by Krutch’s repetition of the key word “believe.”

Consider, too, how different the effect of Joyce Carey’s sentence would have been if he had written, “He suddenly saw the fields—normally viewed as solid flat objects covered with grass or useful crops and dotted with trees—now as colour in astonishing variety and subtlety of gradation.” Carey added the negative in order to highlight his concern with the color.

Note that Carey has compounded his two-part series: the first item in the series, “not as solid flat objects covered with grass or useful crops and dotted with trees,” contains its own two-part series, “covered with grass or useful crops” and “dotted with trees.” And the first item of that interior series contains a two-part series, “grass” and “useful crops.” In addition the second item of the overall series, “but as colour in astonishing variety and subtlety of gradation,” contains an interior two-part series, “variety” and “subtlety.” Whereas Krutch combined negative-positive presentation with key word repetition to increase the intensity of his sentence, Carey has combined negative-positive presentation with interior two-part series to increase both tension and intensity.

Copy these negative-positive sentences; then compose two of your own. Compose one containing a negative-positive sequence without any additional device of intensity. Then compose another sentence containing the negative-positive sequence along with some additional device, such as key-word repetition or interior series.

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10 Antisagogethe positive-negative sequenced sentence

“I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with hummingbirds, but I had never heard of fairies.” Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

“Reason can dissect, but cannot originate; she can adopt, but cannot create; she can modify, but cannot find.” Horatio Greenough, Form and Function

High-tension sentences can also be created by presenting two items in positive-negative order. When the positive is presented first, however, the sentence takes on a particular negative note; there is more complaint in such a sentence, more criticism. When you write in “this, not that” form, you are giving a certain stress to the negative, the absent, the weak, the unfortunate within your content.

Edmund Gosse’s sentence is essentially a complaint. It would have had a much more positive tone if he had written, “I was never told about pirates, but I was told about missionaries; I had never heard of fairies, but I was familiar with humming-birds.” At least the complaint and criticism would have been greatly softened. Likewise, Greenough’s sentence would have been quite different if he had written, “Reason cannot originate, but can dissect; she cannot create, but can adopt; she cannot find, but can modify.” Greenough’s sentence, as actually written—in a positive-negative sequence—is a sharper, more militant criticism of reason and the rational mind.

Copy these two positive-negative sentences; then compose two of your own dealing with something worthy of your complaint and criticism.

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11 HorismosDefinition (Harris chapter 5)

“Feeling guilty makes it all right that you did something. If you didn’t feel guilty you’d be a bad person. That’s not terrible to be a bad person. No, it’s all right to do something as long as you feel guilty about it. Guilt is the salve we put on something that we did so that we don’t have to be responsible for it.” Werner Erhard

“On the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women.” Judith Butler Gender Trouble 3-4

“This owning up to our being constituted in and by language occurs with the unconcealment possible through the activity of phronesis, a rhetorical intelligence with which we perform with integrity to a commitment (the will to truth) while being receptive to indeterminacy (the will to power) within the unique and unpredictable particularities of our lived situations.” Kopp “Cutting the Edge of the Will to Truth” 176

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12 Exemplumproviding examples (Harris chapter 5)

“The speaker illustrated his presentation with slides—color slides, text slides, drawings, photographs, slides with video clips, musical slides, altogether too many slides—and spoke as if we already knew the material.” –Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

“I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something like the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green Yin and orange Yang—I had to have it. The Rislampa/Har lamps from wire and environmentally-friendly unbleached paper; the Vild hall clock of galvanized steel; the Klipsk shelving unit: I would flip and wonder, ‘What kind of dining room set defines me as a person?’ … The things you own, they end up owning you.” –Jack’s monologue in the film Fight Club

“We’re consumers. We’re by products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty—these things don’t concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.” –Tyler Durden’s monologue in the film Fight Club

These examples are themselves also examples of synathroismos (synonymia and congeries).

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13 Prosapodosisredditio: supplying a sufficient rationale for two or more parallel, often antithetical claims

“It is better to command no one than to be a slave to any one; for we may live honorably with command, but in slavery there is no endurance of life.” Quintilian

“A story becomes a kind of living philosophy that the audience members grasp as a whole, in a flash, without conscious thought—a perception married to their life experiences. But the irony is this: The more beautifully you shape your work around one clear idea, the more meanings audiences will discover in your film as they take your idea and follow its implications into every aspect of their lives. Conversely, the more ideas you try to pack into a story, the more they implode upon themselves, until the film collapses into a rubble of tangential notions, saying nothing.” Robert McKee, Story 115

“Stereotypes about ‘the other’—the other sex, the racialized other—are in fact technically projections. They derive from our notions of the self, and belong to a simplistic opposition of self versus other. Within that way of thinking, which is in fact the way we usually think about the other, ‘the other’ is always derivative, based on how we understand the self. When we encounter another person, either we presume he is the same as us or we put him in the category of our other. And if in the latter category, we then presume he is our opposite, strong where we are weak and weak where we are strong. We tend to view the other as a photographic negative of our image of the self.” (Jane Gallop “Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters” 14-15).

While the The Lion King promotes the consummate virtue of preserving the sacred circle of life through acting in accordance with the inviolate truth of one’s proper place within that circle, the film’s antagonist, Scar, converts this virtue into a vice, exposing those who follow these inherited rules without question or thought to be unworthy to rule, to serve, or even to live, because they altogether lack Scar’s virtuous perspective, a perspective that embraces and enacts the critical intelligence and imagination, the courage and agency to bring forth what is truly new, a perspective that can only

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occur as deceptive, devious, and ultimately destructive of all those who hold dear the virtue of the circle of life.

This figure complements another argumentative figure called “aetiologia,” which is the figure of supplying the cause for a given effect: it is the necessity to supply the “because” to anything we say. Prosapodosis involves returning to the claim to supply the rationale, and to do so by supplying the antithesis as well. Thus, any statement of the context and purpose of a controlling value is given by prosapodosis.

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14 Paradiastole distinctio—revealing the vice within a virtue, or the virtue within a vice

“You call yourself wise rather than cunning, or courageous rather than heedless, or careful rather than parsimonious.” Rutilius

“In our world, a man is confident, but a woman is arrogant; a man is uncompromising, but a woman is a ball-breaker; a man is assertive, a woman is aggressive; a man is strategic, a woman is manipulative; a man is a leader, a woman is controlling; a man is authoritative, a woman is annoying. The characteristic or the behavior is the same; what is different is the sex.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“I don’t think you understood what was — this was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk.” Donald Trump responding to the Access Hollywood tape.

“It is no common thief, but a violent robber; no common adulterer, but the ravager of all chastity; no common profaner, but the grand enemy of all that is sacred and holy; no common murderer, but the cruel butcher of our citizens and our subjects, whom we have haled before your judgment-seat: so vile, that I conceive him the one man in history who, arraigned as he is arraigned, could gain, not lose, by a verdict of condemnation.” Cicero

“Michael Jackson was born in August 1958. So was I. Michael Jackson grew up in the suburbs of the Midwest. So did I. Michael Jackson had eight brothers and sisters. So do I. When Michael Jackson was six, he became a superstar, and was perhaps the world’s most beloved child. When I was six, my mother died. I think he got the shorter end of the stick. I never had a mother, but he never had a childhood. And when you never get to have something, you become obsessed by it.” Madonna, WMA speech, 2009.

In its simplest form, paradiastole uses euphemism to transform a vice into a virtue, or to cast a heretofore unseen virtuous light on an otherwise endarkened vice. Paradiastole also gives us access to converting down into a vice what otherwise appears to be a virtue. In a more global sense paradiastole involves a parallel placement of distinctions where, on the one hand, we combine dissimilar things, and on the other, make similar things separate. Vico writes that paradiastole “concerns those things which are commonly associated with one another because of

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their affinity so that when one is negated the other is affirmed” (The Art of Rhetoric 180).Compare this to the figure of thought Vico calls “color,” where “we prove an appearance of truth in the cause which is contrary to ours” (The Art of Rhetoric 177). It its more elaborate forms, paradiastole occurs with prosapodosis, as well as antithesis, antimetabole, synathroismos, to name but a few.

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15 SynoikeiosisParadox: bringing together of contraries (Forsyth chapter 23)

“It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” –Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I don’t want to be in a battle, but waiting on the edge of one I can’t escape is even worse.” –Perigrin Took, servant to the Steward of Gondor Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

I could neither continue listening nor turn away.

“I can’t live with or without you.” –U2 “With or Without You.”

I’m not asking you to agree or disagree with what I’m saying. I’m not interested in whether you believe or don’t believe me, in whether you think what I’m saying is true or false, right or wrong. Just “try on” what I’m saying, like trying on a jacket to see how it fits: stand inside what I am saying and look out at a specific situation you are dealing with right now and see what shows up for you. But as soon as you agree or don’t agree, as soon as you believe or don’t believe, as soon as you assert it to be true or false, right or wrong, then you have lost any access to seeing the world from any point of view that doesn’t fit your criteria for validity.

You didn’t make a bad choice; you didn’t make a good choice: you made the choice you made.

“Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in

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the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men’s stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.” –Joseph Campbell Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

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16 Auxesisclimax (gradatio; incrementum): series of words, phrases, clauses given in a sequence of increasing weight or importance (Harris chapter 2).

“Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all.” –Stephen Leacock

“The end of this is obscenity. Let’s really see their genitals, let’s really endanger the actor through stunts, let’s really set the building on fire. Over the course of a movie, it forces the filmmaker to get more and more bizarre. Over the course of a career, it forces the filmmaker to get more and more outré; over the course of a culture, it forces the culture to degenerate into depravity, which is what we have now.” –David Mamet. On Directing Film. 63

“Looking back today over the twelve delightful years that I spent on this richly rewarding enterprise, I find that its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge.” –Joseph Campbell from the Foreword to The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology.

In her article, “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters,” Jane Gallop argues that, on the one hand, reading for the main idea brings us to ignore details that might challenge the prejudices and stereotypes we unwittingly project into the text, leading us to fail to learn, fail to write well, fail to treat others ethically; on the other hand, when we close-read, so argues Gallup, we attend to surprising details we ordinarily overlook, details that challenge those prejudices and stereotypes we ordinarily project into the text, which then allows us new possibilities, the possibility to learn, the possibility to write well, and ultimately the possibility to treat others ethically.

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Notice in the passage from Mamet his use of schemes of restatement, namely, anaphora (repetition of words/phrases at the beginning of sentences/clauses) and epanalepsis (the end repeats, with an antithesis, the beginning: obscenity=depravity / end=now).

The Campbell sentence folds into the gradations of its climax as an extended simile, which in itself performs the climax it is in fact talking about.

My sentence that summarizes Gallop’s article employs the figures of climax, antithesis, zeugma, conduplicatio, anaphora, tricolon, and even epanalepsis.

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17 Anaphorabeginning a series of clauses or sentences with the same word or phrase (Forsyth chapter 39; Harris chapter 11)

“The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson’s style is, that there is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it.” William Hazlitt, On Familiar Style

“Art, for most Americans, is a very queer fish—it can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bribed, it can’t be doped out or duplicated; above all, it can’t be cashed in on.” Louis Kronenberger, America and Art

“When the stable self exploded and the ‘universal foundation for knowledge’ crumbled, when the discreet partnership between ‘knowledge’ and power was exposed and the linguistic ground of ‘rationality’ was dis/covered—composition instruction quietly continued to do what it had always done, as if its goals and motivations had not been tremendously problematized by what had been going on outside its own house.” –Diane D. Davis Breaking Up [At] Totality 7

Another intensifying device you can use in constructing a series of any length is anaphora: beginning each item in the series with the same word or words. In Hazlitt’s tricolon, you will notice that he has begun each item with the word “no”: “no discrimination, no selection, no variety.” In Louis Kronenberger’s long series, each item begins with the words “it can’t be.”

You will use anaphora to give a pounding emphasis to each item in a series, and thereby elevate the entire series onto a more intense and dramatic level of writing. To create anaphora, you can employ more than one word; whereas Hazlitt uses only “no” in the anaphora, Kronenberger, uses three words, “it can’t be.” As anaphora deepens, as more and more words are repeated at the beginning of each item, the more intense the device becomes.

Davis’s master sentence (its rhythm and rhyme work together to hit home the sense) stands on anaphora’s shoulders to enact two isocolons (the first one a pair of active voiced clauses, the second passive) that also unfold an auxesis (climax), the highest point of which ends with the em dash, which climactic intensity is then demolished by the clear lack of impact of the seemingly tremendous weight of both anaphoric isocolons.

Copy the above three sentences; then compose your own.

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18 Epistropheending successive clauses with the same word or phrase (Forsyth chapter 15; Harris chapter 11)

“There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.” –Gertrude Stein

“To the good American many subjects are sacred; sex is sacred, women are sacred, children are sacred, business is sacred, America is sacred, Masonic lodges and college clubs are sacred.” George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States

“Raphael points wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Civilization

“All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel forever drawn back to Greek, and be forever making up for some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?” Virginia Woolf, On Not Knowing Greek

Of equal intensity with anaphora is epistrophe: ending each item in a series with the same word or words. Epistrophe is a dramatic way of showing the common denominator that unites a diverse series of subjects, and epistrophe forces a reader to an inescapable awareness of each item by placing it before a recurring terminal word or words.

Santayana, for instance, makes us hear with startling clarity the words “sex,” “women,” “children,” “business,” “America,” and “Masonic lodges and college clubs” because they are all placed against a common background: the word “sacred.” How different would Santayana’s sentence have been if it read in a simpler form: “To the good American many subjects are sacred: sex, women, children, business, America, Masonic lodges and college clubs.” In such an ordinary series, neither the word “sacred” nor any individual item in the series would have challenged our attention. Likewise, in Emerson’s sentence we hear much more loudly and clearly the words “Raphael paints,” “Handel sings,” “Phidias carves,” “Shakespeare writes,” “Wren builds,” and so on because they are noticeable variations placed in contrast with the constant “it.’

With epistrophe, a sentence is given a rich, driving power. You will find this device valuable to use when you have to present a number of items that have some common characteristic or feature. Word repetition can be extended to some length in the stylistic sentence, becoming something like a refrain or chorus. Virginia Woolf has presented the word “Greek” five times to achieve extreme emphasis and to create a sentence seemingly “nailed together’' with the repeated word. We can almost hear the hammer blows as Virginia Woolf pounds in the word “Greek,” fastening the sentence together. Extended repetition is a valuable device to use when you wish to suggest a certain amount of compulsiveness, weary vexation, anger, or even irritation; it is a valuable kind of sentence to use in criticism, argument, and disputation.

Copy two or three of these sentences; then compose sentences in which you use epistrophe. Use a three-part series in one sentence and a five-part series in the other. Concerning Woolf’s sentence, write a sentence dealing with an issue or subject that especially concerns you or disturbs you.

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19 Symplocebeginning a series of clauses or sentences with the same word, and ending the same series with the repetition of another word (Harris chapter 11)

“I was born an American; I will live an American, I shall die an American.” Daniel Webster, Speech, 17 July 1850

“Very, very little in life turns out the way it was promised. People are told that when they graduate life will be wonderful, life will be easy, and it didn’t turn out that way. When you get married it’ll be great but it doesn’t turn out that way. People say when you get divorced it’ll be all right but it doesn’t turn out that way. Most things don’t live up to their promises.” –Werner Erhard

Finally, you can combine anaphora and epistrophe to create the inescapable effect of symploce. By beginning each item with the same word and by closing each item with the same word, you achieve a double-barreled stylistic effect that is especially dramatic and emphatic.

Copy the above sentence; then compose one in which you use the device of symploce. Begin each item in the series, whatever its length, with the same word or words, and close each item in the series with the same word or words.

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20 Anadiplosisbeginning a clause or sentence with the word that ended the previous clause or sentence, usually within a series of steps leading to a climax (Forsyth chapter 9; Harris chapter 12)

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Yoda

“And there they have it, the color called Landlord’s Brown, immune to time, flood, tropic heat, arctic chill, punk rumbles, slops, blood, leprotic bugs, cockroaches the size of mice, mice the size of rats, rats the size of Airedales, and lumpenprole tenants.” Tom Wolfe, Putting Daddy On

“We have lost our concern with the ends because we have lost our touch with reality and we have lost our touch with reality because we are estranged from the means to reality which is the poem—the work of art.” Archibald MacLeish, Why Do We Teach Poetry?

“This is great poetry, and it is dramatic; but besides being poetic and dramatic, it is something more.” T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama

“Passing bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over and every hour, someone is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Aes Triplex

In a long-series sentence where the series has been extended to the point of absurdity, Tom Wolfe has used yet another stylistic transformation: ending one item in the series with the word that begins the next item—“the size of mice, the size of rats, rats the size of Airedales. . . This device is called anadiplosis. You will use anadiplosis to give a sentence—or at least that part of the sentence in which it occurs—a greater continuity and a slowertempo (anadiplosis puts a sentence into something like slow motion). You will also use this device to give additional emphasis to the words involved.

You are not limited to the series in the use of anadiplosis, however. It can be used in any sentence that has two or more phrases or clauses. In Archibald MacLeish’s sentence the words “we have lost our touch with reality” are repeated at the beginning of the next clause, “and we have lost our touch with reality.”

Anadiplosis is sometimes muted—that is, more suggested than actually achieved in the technical sense. In T. S. Eliot’s sentence the words “poetry” and “dramatic” are taken from the first part of the sentence and “poetic” and “dramatic” are used to begin the second part. The effect is that of anadiplosis, and the same continuity, emphasis, overlapping, and slow-motion is achieved.

Anadiplosis may occur at the end of the one sentence and the beginning of the next sentence, as in the sentences from Stevenson’s Aes Triplex.

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Copy the four sentences; then compose two sentences of your own containing anadiplosis.

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21 Conduplicatiorepeating a key word from a clause at the beginning of the next (Harris chapter 12)

“The end, the goal, the aspiration is to say something, and the something you want to say will be the measure of whether you have written a sentence that is not only coherent but good.” –Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence 36

When we discover a phenomenon for ourselves, we are on the pathway to mastery and leadership, the cutting edge of discipline or craft, but to discover a phenomenon, to look and see it for yourself for the first time, is probably one of the most difficult of all endeavors, as it is much easier to just accept what “they” have told us already about the phenomenon in question.

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22 EpanalepsisThe Circular Sentence (Forsyth chapter 32; Harris chapter 12)

“Across the United States of America, from New York to California and back, glazed, again, for many months of the year there streams and sings for its heady supper a dazed and prejudiced procession of European lecturers, scholars, sociologists, economists, writers, authorities on this and that and even, in theory on the United States of America.” Dylan Thomas, A Visit to America

“The long strands of means and ends, which transform life into a technical problem, make it completely impossible to remain clearly aware at every instant of the terminus of each strand.” Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

Beginning and ending a clause or a sentence with the same word or words is called epanalepsis. Epanalepsis creates something like a circular sentence in that it ends where it began. Using epanalepsis, Dylan Thomas has written a razzle-dazzle sentence—one that boasts a complex series and high diction as well—typical of the intense, elaborate style for which he is famous.

This fairly long sentence makes a complete circle: “United States of America . . . United States of America.” Thomas has used it at the beginning of an essay to get the essay off to a rollicking start. Many writers do such a thing: Start a composition with an attention-getting sentence, employing some elaborate stylistic device, such as the circular sentence.

Copy Dylan Thomas’s sentence; then compose a similar sentence that begins and ends with the same words.

Simmel’s sentence gives the reader a hint of a wide angle view that is actually forbidden to have, a prohibition the reader only discovers as he follows the winding “strand” of the sentence to the end.

Copy Georg Simmel’s sentence; then compose a similar sort of epanaleptic sentence.

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23 Polyptotonrepeating a word, but in a different case (Forsyth chapter 2)

Your inventory is composed of all the things that you either invented yourself or inherited from others.

“His illness was beyond all hope of healing before anyone realized that he was ill.” James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“America had to be made before it could be lived in, and that making took centuries, took extraordinary energies and bred an attitude of life that is peculiarly American.” D. W. Brogan, The American Character

“Different ages have answered the question differently.” Virginia Woolf, The Patron and the Crocus

Sometimes circular sentences make use of modified epanalepsis, employing not the same word at the beginning and end but some form of the same word. (Whenever you use a variant form of a word, you are using the device of polyptoton.) In Baldwin’s sentence “illness” and “ill” create a modified epanalepsis and effect a circular sentence. The circular sentence is especially effective if there is one central theme a writer wishes to emphasize, as James Baldwin wishes to emphasize illness. By beginning and ending with the same idea, Baldwin seems to say that illness was the sum of his father’s final days; it was an all-encompassing and total event and experience.

Likewise, in Brogan’s sentence no one can mistake the main concern: The subject, “America,” is absolutely reinforced by being placed at the beginning and, as “American,” at the end of the sentence. In Virginia Woolf’s sentence the modified epanalepsis creates an aphoristic quality—closing the sentence off, rounding it into completeness, as though to say there is nothing beyond this sentence.

Copy these three sentences; then compose three of your own in which modified epanalepsis is used. Write one expressing the total domination of a subject that you name at the beginning and end of the sentence. Write another that expresses what you consider a truth about life, again naming the subject at the beginning and end of the sentence.

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24 Diacopethe word sandwich (Forsyth chapter 12; Harris chapter 13)

“Boys will be boys.”

“Well played, my friend. Well played.”

Copy these sentences given above (or in Forsyth or Harris); then compose sentences of your own that include diacope.

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25 EpizeuxisThe Repeated-Word-Sentence (Forsyth chapter 17; Harris chapter 13)

“For to mean anything high enough and hard enough is to fail, fail joyously.” John Ciardi, “Manner of Speaking”

“Surrounded by her listeners, she talked in a slow circle in her fine deep voice, the word ʻperceptionʼ occurring again and again and yet again like the brass ring the children snatch for as their hobby horses whirl by.” Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait

“They hire English nannies, if possible, always nice middling women with sensible hairdos, sensible clothes, and sensible shoes.” Tom Wolfe, The Nanny Mafia

Another form of key-word repetition used to achieve the stylistic sentence is the repetition of the same word in close proximity. John Ciardi, in his sentence, has repeated the word “enough” with only two words between, and he has repeated “fail” with no words intervening. Such close repetitions are technically known as epizeuxis and are an important way to emphasize particular words. They also give a sentence a certain focus and climax, and they frequently give the sentence a special rhythmical quality.

Epizeuxis can occur with any part of speech: In Ciardi’s sentence it is achieved with an adverb and also a verb; in Katherine Anne Porter’s sentence, with an adverb; and in Tom Wolfe’s sentence, with an adjective.

Copy each of the above three sentences; then compose three sentences of your own in which you repeat words in close sequence. Vary the part of speech of the repeated words from one sentence to the next.

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26 Ploce or Antanaclasiskey word repeated with a different meaning

I am a pushover, but you are going to have to push me over.

“Your argument is sound... all sound.” Benjamin Franklin

“There is no there, there.” Gertrude Stein

“A superstition is a superstition only when it isn’t a superstition, and a superstition isn’t a superstition only when it is a superstition.”

“I like that you’re lonely/lonely like me/I could be lonely with you.” “Broken” Lovelytheband

“A friend in power is a friend lost.” Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“If your readers dislike you, they will dislike what you say.” F. L. Lucas, Style

“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.” Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

From Rhetorica Ad Herennium:“One who has nothing in life more desirable than life cannot cultivate a virtuous life.”

“Why do you so zealously concern yourself with this matter, which will cause you much concern?”

One of the things you can do to transform a basic sentence into a stylistic sentence is to repeat a key word. In Henry Adams’s sentence, the repetition of the noun “friend” not only gives emphasis to “friend” itself, but also distinguishes the entire sentence from a more ordinary expression of the same thought. Adams might have written, “A friend in power is lost” or “Once a friend has power, he is lost” or “We lose our friends when they gain power.” Adams chose, however, for stylistic reasons, a more structured form.

Such key-word repetition—it may be the repetition of a noun, or a verb as in F. L. Lucas’s sentence, or an adjective as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s sentence—often occurs in a separate phrase or clause that is clearly removed from the initial appearance of the key word. A part of this type of sentence’s effectiveness results from

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the reader’s encountering the key word after intervening words have occurred.

Sentences with a single key-word repetition in them frequently have an aphoristic quality, and therefore are valuable to use when you are expressing something you consider an indisputable, important, or memorable truth.

Copy three sentences given above; then compose three sentences of your own, one in which you repeat the major noun in the sentence, one in which you repeat a verb, and one in which you repeat an adjective.

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27 Scesis Onomatona series of synonymous phrases or clauses, often without a main verb, a kind of synathroismos (synonymia or congeries) (Forsyth chapter 38; Harris chapter 13)

“He has shaken our faith at its roots; he has demolished the foundation of our beliefs.”

“It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.” --John Cleese in Monty Python’s “Parrot Sketch”

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.” --Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Scesis onomaton is a species of “synonymia” (synthroismos) in which the writer produces a multitude of synonymous phrases, and is the counterpart to the scheme called “congeries,” wherein the synonyms occur as single words or short phrases (think of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day).

The example from Dicken’s follows a form of the scheme that employs a regular pattern of phrases composed of nouns and adjectives without an independent verb. All verbs used in the passage are parts of dependent clauses.

The rhetorical effect of scesis onomaton is to amplify the meaning and charge of something.

Copy these sentences given above; then compose sentences of your own.

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28 Zeugmalinking together in the same sentence two or more words, phrases, or clauses, using a word or phrase stated in one place and implied when the other words, phrases, or clauses occur (Forsyth chapter 22; Harris chapter 6)

“She grabbed her purse from the alcove, her gloves from the table near the door, and her car keys from the punchbowl.” Harris

“Lust conquers shame, audacity fear, madness reason.” Susenbrotus

“How are we to find the knowledge of reality in the world without, or in the shifting, flowing fluid world within?” Archibald MacLeish, Why Do We Teach Poetry?

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29 Diazeugmaa single subject (noun) linking multiple verbs or verb phrases (Harris chapter 6)

“The book reveals the extent of counterintelligence operations, discusses the options for improving security, and argues for an increase in human intelligence measures.” Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

“The argument began in a dispute over the meaning of a word and ended in a fight over the ownership of ten thousand acres.” Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

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30 Prozeugmalinking word, often a verb, is presented once and then omitted from rest of the sentence (Harris chapter 6)

“Save his gray hairs from rebuke and his aged mind from despair.” Hoskins

“Her beauty pierced my eye, her speech my woeful heart, her presence all my powers of my discourse.” Adapted from Puttenham 248

“Hope makes us regard what we desire, and fear what we are afraid of, as being probable and near, and both magnify their object.” Schopenhauer

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31 Mesozeugmathe linking word, often a verb, occurs in the middle of the sentence (Harris chapter 6)

“Either the truth or speak nothing at all!” Adapted from Puttenham 248

“The blouse was creased but not the scarf.” Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

“The image of the inherited enemy is already sleeping in the nervous system, and along with it the well-proven reaction.” Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

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32 Hypozeugmathe linking word follows the words linked (Harris chapter 6)

“The crying infant from its crib, the desperate woman off the roof, and the injured man from the flooded basement were all rescued.” Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

All of them, every last one, each and every jelly bean, is gone, consumed, eaten, removed from existence forever and before I had enjoyed even one.

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33 Syllepsisa verb links words, phrases, clauses, but not all with the same meaning (Forsyth chapter 18; Harris chapter 6)

“She was unwilling to drive to that party because she was afraid to damage her car or her reputation.” Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

“He grabbed his hat from the rack by the door and a kiss from the lips of his wife.” Harris Writing with Style and Clarity

“Sir, it seems that you are no better a judge of human beings than you are a specimen of one. Just on a brief inventory, I’d say that you could use yourself a shave and a brighter disposition, and lastly, if you don’t mind me aspersin’ your friends, a better class of drinking buddy.” Buster Scruggs, the San Saba Songbird, from The Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

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34 Anastropherepositioned-adjective sentence (Harris chapter 7)

“Salisbury Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical.” William Hazlitt, On Going on a Journey

“Consider what dreams must have dominated the builders of the Pyramids—dreams geometrical, dreams funereal, dreams of resurrection, dreams of outdoing the pyramid of some other pharaoh!” George Santayana, Soliloquies in England

“Mister Fink, they have not invented a genre of picture that Bill Mayhew has not, at one time or other, been invited to essay. Yes, I have taken my stab at the rasslin’ form, as I have stabbed at so many others, and with as little success. I gather that you are a freshman here, eager for an upperclassman’s counsel. However, just at the moment, I have drinking to do. Why don’t you stop by my bungalow, which is number fifteen, later on this afternoon, and we will discuss rasslin’ scenarios and other things lit’rary.” W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink.

Another easy way to transform a basic sentence into a stylistic one is to move words from their normal syntactical position into a more unusual position, and the easiest kind of word to manipulate in such a way is the adjective. Hazlitt achieved an interesting sentence simply by moving his three adjectives from in front of the noun “discussion” and presenting them after the noun. Instead of writing “Salisbury Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear an antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical discussion, Hazlitt moved his adjectives to emphasize the adjectives themselves and to give the entire sentence a new and unusual structure and sound. In doing so, he lifted the sentence from a pedestrian level to a more noticeable level. The repositioned-adjective sentence can be used for variation in a passage of writing that relies heavily upon adjective modification.

In Santayana’s sentence we find another dramatic version of the repositioned adjective. This sentence is certainly more dramatic than a more basic version: “Consider what geometrical and funereal dreams of resurrection must have dominated the builders of the Pyramids who yearned to outdo the pyramid of some other Pharaoh!” Notice, too, that Santayana’s sentence is doubly dramatic since it makes use not only of adjectives moved from their normal position but it also makes use of key-word repetition. This sentence is a good example of how a writer can begin to compound stylistic intensity and elaborateness in a sentence by doing more than one noticeable thing at the same time.

Copy the first two sentences; then compose two sentences of your own—one in which you present one or more adjectives after the noun rather than in front, and another in which you use not only unusual adjective placement but also some form of word repetition. You may wish to prepare for this exercise by first writing a descriptive sentence in which you employ a number of adjectives, all in the normal front-of-the-noun position, and then

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rewriting your sentence with one or two of your adjectives moved to an unusual position for the sake of emphasis or simple variation.

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35 MetanoiaInterrupting a thought to revise it in a way that is either contradictory or (Harris chapter 5)

I am angry—no, furious at your cavalier attitude.

“What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as it appears within a dimension of assessment.” Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence 39

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36 Appositiveinterrupted sentence, where a word or phrase restates another word or phrase (Harris chapter 7)

“They have observed—that is to say, they have really seen—nothing.” Arnold Bennett, The Author's Craft

“How then does a man—be he good or bad—big or little—a philosopher or a fribble—St. Paul or Horace Walpole—make his memoirs interesting?” Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta

“The Zoroastrian religion appeared, presenting the notion that the world was originally good—harmless, so to say—and that an evil principle moved in to precipitate a fall.” Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, 3

Stylistic sentences may be achieved by the judicious use of interruptions. You have already copied and composed the interrupted sentence in your study of basic sentences, but now you will want to note the particular stylistic uses to which the interrupted sentence can be put.

The interrupted sentence is used in two ways. One, the interruption can draw attention to that element in the sentence that follows the interruption. In Arnold Bennett’s sentence the word ‘‘nothing” receives a special emphasis because of the suspenseful nature of the words preceding it. Two, the interruption frequently acts as a kind of brake on the rhythm of the sentence and consequently can indicate termination: The concluding sentence in a paragraph or whole composition is frequently of an interrupted nature—interrupted so as to “put on the brake” verbally, as the writer brings a particular unit of composition to its conclusion.

Interruptions may be of any length, of course, and may be of a complex nature, made up of various separate items. In Birrell’s sentence, there is a deliberate use of the interruption to create stylistic suspense and to give greater emphasis to the concluding words. In this sentence you will note that the device of interruption has been joined with the device of the rhetorical question for a more complex stylistic effect.

Copy the two interrupted sentences; then compose two of your own—one with a rather simple interruption focusing attention upon the word that follows the interruption, and one with a complex interruption of several items.

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37 Parenthesisthe aside (Harris chapter 7)

“Even mathematical solutions (though here I speak with trembling) can have aesthetic beauty.” F. L. Lucas, Style

“Al? What are you doing?”He began a sentence: “I am—” but when he was taken by surprise, every

sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods—“packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing.” Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections, 11

Some interruptions are more digressive than others. While the usual interruption may be an appositive or a modification or a direct explanation, the interruption can become something like an “aside” and truly parenthetical, whether presented within parentheses or not. Such digressive interruptions may be more startling than other kinds of interruptions and are frequently placed within parentheses to indicate that they are to be “spoken with a whisper.” Digressive interruptions, the whispered asides, can be used stylistically to soften content, to give increased importance to what follows the aside, to establish the very nature of the persona in a composition, or simply to relieve the bluntness of a direct style.

Consider Lucas’s sentence. A basic statement, “Even mathematical solutions can have aesthetic beauty” has been

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modified by the interruption so that the reader is put in brief suspense following the word “solutions”; he is forced to wait a few words before finding out what Lucas has to say about his subject. Also, the aside, “though here I speak with trembling,” gives a new quality to the sentence by adding—to a statement that sounds like the premise of a syllogism—a certain personal, human, and subjective quality. To keep the sentence from being strictly declarative and expository, Lucas uses the digressive interruption to introduce a softening tone. The sentence becomes less didactic and slightly more dramatic. In addition, the concluding words “aesthetic beauty” take on new emphasis as a result of their delay.

Copy the sentence above; then compose a similar sentence containing a digressive interruption by using parentheses.

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38 Metabasistransitional summary; picking up where one left off (Harris chapter 4)

Locate at least three examples of metabasis you find worthy to copy and emulate.

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39 Procatalepsisprolepsis: handling in advance objections the audience has (Forsyth chapter 36; Harris chapter 4)

“I realize that some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man.” Hermann Hesse, Demian

“You are always right, always and never not… You might be thinking to yourself right now, ‘But sometimes I’m wrong.’ And I’d say ‘You’re right about that, too.’” Anonymous.

“Your human mind is so constituted that it cannot accept anything which does not conform with what it has previously experienced or learned, and which its intellect does not consider reasonable.” Joseph S. Benner The Impersonal Life

“For if it is true, as the Greek philosopher Antisthenes (born c. 444 b.c.) has said, that “God is not like anything: hence no one can understand him by means of an image,” or, as we read in the Indian Upanishads, “It is other, indeed, than the known. And, moreover, above the unknown!” then it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.” Joseph Campbell, Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

Also at work in Campbell’s sentence is a distinctio (paradiastole), redditio (prosapodosis), synoikeiosis, and antithesis, among others.

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40 Paralepsis praeteritio; apophasis: saying by not saying (Harris chapter 15)

I promised myself that I was not going to mention, even once, your bad manners or your mean-spirited intentions, and of course, I was never going to say a thing about your unbearable halitosis.

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41 Hypophoraasking and answering questions (Forsyth chapter 13; Harris chapter 4)

“And is there no implied intention, then, to rest satisfied with some final body or sufficient number of facts? No Indeed! There is to be only a continuing search for more—as of a mind eager to grow.” Joseph Campbell “The Impact of Science on Myth.”

“Can I just let myself forget what you’ve told me? Can I just let myself forget what you made me do? You think I just want another puzzle to solve? Another John G to look for? You’re a John G. So you can be my John G. Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy... yes, I will.” Leonard Shelby Memento

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.” Friedrich Nietzsche “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”

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42 Erotesisrhetorical question (Forsyth chapter 13; Harris chapter 15)

“Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corruptors, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?” Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

A standard, and in many ways easy, method of giving stylistic aura to a sentence is to convert it into a rhetorical question. Virginia Woolf could easily have left her sentence in its basic form: “Books that have wasted our time and sympathy are criminals; writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease are the most insidious enemies, corruptors, and defilers of society.” By converting the statement into a question, she gave it a new stylistic dimension. You will note, however, that she could have presented the rhetorical question in the positive, rather than in the negative: “Are they criminals...; are they the most insidious...,” but by including the “not” she forces the reader into agreement and affirmation.

If you were to start with a basic statement, “The sky is dark blue,” you might achieve a stylistic conversion by asking, “Is the sky dark blue?” in a context that suggests a “yes” answer or by asking the question “Is not the sky dark blue?” so as to demand a “yes” answer. The difference in the two forms of rhetorical question is that the negative form is less subtle in its request for agreement.

Note that, stylistically, Virginia Woolf does several other things in her sentence: She shuns the ordinary syntax, “Are books not criminals,” and uses instead “Are they not criminals, books . . .” which serves as a parenthesis. Then she repeats the key word “books”: the first repetition is epanalepsis (circular sentence), followed by a third repetition using anadiplosis (repeating the last word from the prior phrase at the beginning of the next). There are several other schemes at work in this sentence. See if you can distinguish them.

Copy the rhetorical question given above; then compose a similar question of your own, that is based upon some prior declaration or statement. Write both your basic statement and your “question form” of it.

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43 IronySaying one thing and meaning the opposite (Harris chapter 3)

This statement is false.

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44 MeiosisUnderstatement (Harris chapter 3)

I have read a book or two from my library.

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45 LitotesThe denial of a negative term (Forsyth chapter 28; Harris chapter 3)

I am not unhappy with your performance.

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46 Hyperboleexaggeration (Forsyth chapter 34; Harris chapter 3)

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47 Similecomparison between two unrelated things using “like” or “as” (Harris chapter 8)

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes

“Ah, what a mistress, this Etna! with her strange winds prowling round her like Circe’s panthers, some black, some white.” D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia

An idea is frequently presented in a most intense manner when it is compared—startling, dramatically, and unexpectedly—with some highly picturable object, person, or event. Comparisons that are literal are not especially exciting, but comparisons made between different worlds of experience, differing planes of reality become dramatic figures that are an essential part of a writer’s stylistic material. Adding a figure to a literal basic sentence is a sure way to transform the basic into the stylistic.

Figures traditionally have a tenor—the idea or subject you are actually talking about—and a vehicle—the object, person, or event that you introduce for the sake of the startling comparison. In Robert Frost’s figure, the “poem” is the tenor and “a piece of ice” is the vehicle. By comparing a poem to a piece of ice. Frost has concretized and made picturable something he wants to say about the nature of the poetic art. And by making the comparison very explicit, by using the word like so the reader will be certain to notice the comparison. Frost has used what is technically known as a simile.

Similes can be combined with other stylistic devices, of course. D. H. Lawrence, in his sentence, has combined the simile with another form of figurative language, personification, and has, in addition, used a two-part series, “some black, some white,” intensified by balance, antithesis, and anaphora. Whereas Frost has compared an abstraction “poem” with the concrete “ice,” Lawrence has compared the unseeable “winds” with living animals; the difference between the two similes suggests how diverse and creative a writer can be in composing figurative sentences.

Copy these two figurative sentences; then compose two of your own. Remember a good simile—or, in general, any good figure—is one that is novel and fresh, and that truly adds new insight to the subject you are discussing.

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48 Analogy drawing a comparative relationship between two things or situations, using several points of similarity (Harris chapter 8)

“When Benjamin Franklin drew sparks from the tail of his kite he was thinking as little of the lightning conductor as Hertz, when he investigated electrical waves, was thinking of radio transmission.” Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

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49 Metaphorsimilarity expressed between dissimilar things through cross-appropriating a word from a domain to which it belongs and using it in another it doesn’t (Harris chapter 8)

“Nay, to conclude upon a note of grandeur, it is by ignorance alone that we advance through the rough seas of this our mortal life.” Hilaire Belloc, In Praise of Ignorance

“Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.” Richard Wright Black Boy 169

Less explicit than the simile is the metaphor, wherein the words like or as are omitted. As figures become less explicit, they become stylistically more effective and intense. A metaphor may be presented in this fashion: “Our mortal life is a rough sea.” Or it may be presented, as Belloc has done, in an even more subtle way: “the rough seas of this our mortal life.” This form of metaphor is sometimes called a condensed metaphor, and it is one of the most effective devices you can use in your writing.

Wright’s superb sentence not only employs a condensed (and complex) metaphor, but also employs several schemes as well, including a stacked prozeugma (“rushing” in the first instance, and “heedless” is the linking word in the second that stacks on top of “rushing”) that enacts in the very sentence itself the meaning of the sentence.

Copy these two sentences; then compose new sentences that use these condensed metaphors.

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50 CatachresisAbusio; mixed metaphor: like metaphor, only aptly inappropriate (Forsyth chapter 27)

“You are my density.” George McFly Back to the Future

“I will speak daggers to her, but use none.” Hamlet 3.2.414

“For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd.” –Alan Watts The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (5)

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51 MetonymySubstitute an item associated with something for the something: the genus for the species or vice versa, the creator for the created or vice versa, the container for the contained or vice versa, the possessor for the possessed or vice versa, the cause for the effect or vice versa, etc. (Forsyth chapter 29; Harris chapter 9)

By the time the vest walked into the classroom, the whispers had grown into shouts.

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52 SynechdocheRepresenting a whole by one of its parts or vice versa (Forsyth chapter 29; Harris chapter 9)

“There is evil there that does not sleep; the Great Eye is ever watchful.” Boromir Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

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53 Ethopoeialike prosopopoeia: assuming the voice of a character, living, or dead, or fictional

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54 Prosopopoeiapersonification: giving non human entities human characteristics; giving non human entities a human voice (Forsyth chapter 33; Harris chapter 9)

“Far off, a little yellow plane scuttles down a runway, steps awkwardly into the air, then climbs busily, learning grace.” Robert Penn Warren, Segregation

“Death stands at attention; obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilisation.” Winston Churchill, World Crisis

“The winds that scattered the Spanish Armada blew English literature, which had been merely smoldering for generations, into a blaze of genius.” J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man

Another way of establishing a figure is to compare a nonliving or inanimate subject with something alive. A figure whose vehicle is living and animate is called a personification. Robert Penn Warren has compared a plane (tenor) with a human being (vehicle) or at least with some sort of animal that can “step” and “climb” and “learn.”

Winston Churchill has also used personification. He has compared death, an abstraction, with a soldier who can “stand at attention.”

By knowing how to create personification and reification you can achieve different kinds of figurative sentences and thereby maintain variety in your composition even when writing at a highly intense figurative level.

Copy the first two sentences above; then compose two similar sentences using personification as the means of achieving your figures.

By comparing such an intangible subject as “English Literature” with so tangible a phenomenon as a fire “smouldering... into a blaze,” Priestley has constructed a figurative sentence by means of reification: Reification simply means making whatever you are talking about into a thing. The tenor is abstract, the vehicle is concrete. Reification is one of the standard ways of establishing a figure, whether that figure is presented as a simile or a metaphor.

Copy Priestley’s sentence; then compose a figurative sentence containing an example of reification.

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55 CharacterismusProsopographia: giving shape to the vices and virtues (controlling value) through the characteristics of a person, dead or living or fictional

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56 ApostropheTurning our address away and toward another who may be absent or present, fictional or real, alive or dead, human or nonhuman. (Harris chapter 10)

“Oh! My beloved ice cream bar, how I love to lick your creamy center!” Ren Höek “Space Madness” Ren and Stimpy

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57 HypallageTransferred Epithet: using an adjective appropriate for one noun for another (Forsyth chapter 30; Harris chapter 10)

“Obscure they went under the solitary night.” Virgil Aeneid 6. 268

I play a little guitar.

He smoked a nervous cigarette.

Josiah ate his angry breakfast.

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58 The Complex Figurative Sentence

“When the struggle with somnolence has been fought out and won, when the world is all-covering darkness and close-pressing silence, when the tobacco suddenly takes on fresh vigor and fragrance and the books lie strewn about the table, then it seems as though all the rubbish and floating matter of the day’s thoughts have poured away and only the bright, clear, and swift current of the mind itself remains, flowing happily and without pediment.” Christopher Morley, On Going to Bed

A sentence may contain several separate figures, and some of these figures may be extended to considerable length. In Morley’s sentence, you will notice various metaphors such as: “somnolence” (tenor), “something to fight with” (vehicle); “silence” (tenor), “something that can physically press in on a person” (vehicle); “tobacco” (tenor), “something that can be vigorous” (vehicle); “thoughts” (tenor), “something that can produce rubbish and floating matter” (vehicle); and “mind” (tenor), “a swift current” (vehicle). The metaphors concerning the day’s thoughts and the mind are actually akin to each other and are an extension of the basic metaphor that the mind is a stream that can become contaminated, but that also can be purified.

Copy Morley’s sentence; then compose one, just as long, in which you use at least two different and separate figures of any kind—similes, metaphors; reifications, or personifications. Extend one of the figures through several clauses.

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59 Paromoionthe alliterative sentence (Harris chapter 14)

“All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.” Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

“A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow.” Vladimir Nabokov, Conclusive Evidence

“Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange.” G. K. Chesterton, On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family

On occasion, you will transform a basic sentence by making use of noticeable alliteration. Alliteration can make a statement unified and more memorable. A sentence in which many words are alliterated becomes a sentence with a common phonetic theme running through it, a thread of sound tying the meaning together. As a consequence alliterative sentences are more easily remembered.

Alliteration is achieved by repeating a consonant sound at the beginning of several words. Whitman, for instance, has alliterated the words “beauty,” “beautiful,” “blood,” “beautiful,” and “brain.” There is a limit, of course, to the number of words that can be alliterated in any given sentence, and Whitman’s use of the consonant b five times represents a maximum sort of use.

Nabokov uses the letter m four times in “moist,” “moon,” “mist,” and “meadow”; but he has spread out the alliteration a bit with more intervening words. Perhaps the secret of good alliteration is to limit the number of accented words involved and to avoid too heavy a concentration of the consonant sound.

Many times more than one alliterative consonant is used in a sentence. Chesterton, for instance, alliterates f twice, then shifts to the letter s. This can create an especially delightful effect, as one sound is contrasted with another, and as a result each is heightened, without becoming monotonous.

Copy the three alliterative sentences; then compose three of your own. Write two sentences, each with a different letter used in alliteration. Write a third sentence that uses two different letters for alliterative effect.

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60 The Rhythmical Sentence

“He is capable of being shown of what consciousness consists.” Stephen Spender, The Imagination in the Modern World

“Curiosity is a form of desire.” Marchette Chute, Getting at the Truth

Though perhaps all good sentences should be rhythmical, certain sentences have a much more obvious cadence and flow to them and are therefore more useful stylistically. The sentence that attracts us by its patterned flow is a sentence that can be used for all stylistic effects from simple emphasis to calculated grandeur.

In Stephen Spender’s sentence we find a two-part rhythm, echoing old biblical rhythms, old Anglo-Saxon rhythms, and the free-verse rhythms that Walt Whitman popularized in Leaves of Grass. “He is capable of being shown” is the first phrase in the rhythm, “of what consciousness consists” is the balancing phrase. This pendulum-like rhythm, swinging back and forth, could become monotonous and stupefying if it were the prevailing rhythm in a piece of writing; but as a special effect on special occasions, it is a delightful and enjoyable device.

In Marchette Chute’s sentence you will notice a three-part rhythm: “Curiosity” phrase one, “is a form” phrase two, “of desire” phrase three. Three-part rhythms can be used in contrast with two-part rhythms in passages of writing that need to “sing forth,” yet cannot be maintained with one single rhythmic form.

Copy the two rhythmical sentences above; then compose two of your own. One should have a two-part rhythm, the other a three-part rhythm.

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61 The Metrical Sentence (Four Beats)

“The sentence is a single cry.” Herbert Read, English Prose Style

“Hitch your wagon to a star.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Civilization

“The world is very different now.” John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address

On rare occasions you may wish to make a sentence actually metrical; that is, make its accents fall in a regular and patterned way. In Herbert Read’s sentence, you can hear the beat: “The SEN tence is a SIN gle cry.” The beat is a 1-2-3-4 beat or march step, the most common form of the metrical sentence. Metrical sentences are highly memorable because they are almost singable.

Emerson took advantage of the metrical sentence to make his transcendental philosophy understandable and popular; at least he took advantage of it in his famous sentence: HITCH your WAG on TO a STAR.

The modern writer sometimes uses the metrical sentence to make his points: John F. Kennedy included the metrical sentence in his Inaugural Address—a composition that is a rich display of most of the stylistic sentences you are encountering in this text.

Copy the three four-beat sentences above; then compose three of your own.

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62 The Metrical Sentence (Varied Beats)

“May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all.” Henry James, Portraits of Places

“He was the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that ditches the work on dark nights; that, aloft, holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while others work.” Joseph Conrad, The Nigger and the Narcissus

Henry James also makes use of word accents to create a strongly metrical sentence: MAY in VEN ice is BET ter than AP ril, but JUNE is BEST of ALL. In the first clause the metrical feet are a mixture of trochaic and dactylic measures, but in the second clause James shifts to straight iambic feet. The total effect of the sentence is something like a dance, a measured lilt around the room, an appropriate meter for the “vacation” atmosphere of the sentence.

In Conrad’s metrical sentence, you will find an element of rhyme (“splice” “nights”) added to meter, and the effect is almost sing-song. After the opening clause, “He was the man,” the sentence becomes very metrical; it becomes almost a quatrain of iambic di-meter lines:

that cannot steer, that cannot splice,that dodges the work on dark nights.

Then each succeeding clause establishes a definite meter of its own, especially the last clause, which is basically iambic pentameter. This exaggerated form of the metrical sentence is rarely used. You may, however, have need for it on some special occasion: perhaps to be funny, if nothing else.

Copy the two metrical sentences above; then compose two metrical sentences of your own, experimenting as you wish with different kinds of metrical measures and feet.

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63 The Master Sentence

“The worst part of war is not death and destruction but just soldiering; the worst part of soldiering is not danger but nostalgia; and the worst part of a soldier’s nostalgia is the lack of intimacy, the lack of privacy, and the deprivation of the rights of self-determination and ownership.” Robert Henriques, The Voice of the Trumpet

Master sentences are achieved by using a rich number of stylistic devices and by combining, weaving together, and juxtaposing various stylistic modifications and transformations. Robert Henriques has written such a master sentence. In it you will recognize alliteration—“worst,” “war,” “death,” “destruction”; balanced two-part series death and destruction,” “self-determination and ownership”; negative-positive sequence—“not death and destruction but just soldiering, “not danger but nostalgia”; modified anadiplosis soldiering; the worst part of soldiering is not danger but nostalgia; and the worst part of a soldier’s nostalgia”; key-word repetition—“lack,” “lack’; three-part series with anaphora “the worst part of war . . .; the worst part of soldiering . . .; and the worst part of a soldiers nostalgia . . .”; and three-part series without anaphora—“lack of intimacy, the lack of privacy and the deprivation of the rights. . . .” Such a rich mixture of stylistic modifications does not make for confusion, but for a tremendously effective sentence, remarkably clear and sturdy.

Copy Robert Henriques’ sentence; then compose a sentence that employs at least three of the stylistic devices that Henriques used.

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“Vengeance then is forbidden; sacrifice is forbidden; justice is impossible: what remains? the fourth choice? forgiveness? And how then forgiveness?” Charles Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins

In this sentence Charles Williams opens with a three-part series—a tricolon: “Vengeance then is forbidden; sacrifice is forbidden; justice is impossible.” Then he dramatically concludes the sentence with a series of rhetorical questions: “what remains? the fourth choice? forgiveness? and how then forgiveness?” In the course of the three-part series and the four rhetorical questions, Williams uses key-word repetition: “forbidden,” “forbidden” (not quite an epistrophe because the third item in the series differs) and “forgiveness,” “forgiveness.’’

Also in the sentence are some splendid subtleties: Do you notice that the second word in the sentence is “then” and the next to the last word in the sentence is “then”? Do you also notice that the sentence opens with “vengeance” and closes with “forgiveness,” two opposed or antithetical words?

Copy Charles Williams’s sentence; then compose a sentence that opens with a tricolon and closes with a set of rhetorical questions. Add as many subtle stylistic devices as you can.

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“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation,’ a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address

Opening with a metaphor, this splendid sentence proceeds through the negative-positive sequences—“not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear. ...” It continues with such modifications as a balanced two-part series of which the negative-positive sequences are part; repositioned adjectives—“embattled we are”; balance with anaphora—“year in and year out”; and a concluding four-part series.

John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address has become famous because of the use of such stylistic sentences. It serves to show that in all forms of writing, public and private, objective and subjective, logical and impassioned, stylistic sentences play a vital and important role.

Copy John F. Kennedy’s sentence; then compose a similar sentence. Open with a metaphor, continue through a negative-positive sequence and through a separate and distinct balance, and conclude with a four-part series.

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“I was born in a large Welsh town at the beginning of the Great War—an ugly, lovely town (or so it was and is to me), crawling, sprawling by a long and splendid curving shore where truant boys and sandfield boys and old men from nowhere, beachcombed, idled and paddled, watched the dockbound ships or the ships steaming away into wonder and India, magic and China, countries bright with oranges and loud with lions; threw stones into the sea for the barking outcast dogs; made castles and forts and harbours and race tracks in the sand; and on Saturday afternoons listened to the brass band, watched the Punch and Judy, or hung about on the fringes of the crowd to hear the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white-horsed and full of fishes.” Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning

In this magnificent sentence, loose and long, constituting an entire paragraph, great use is made of details placed in various forms of the series. After the initial statement the sentence proceeds descriptively, using double adjectives in front of nouns—“ugly, lovely town”—and double participles after the noun—“crawling, sprawling”—along with many instances of balance—“so it was and is to me,” “long and splendid,” “idled and paddled,” and “bright with oranges and loud with lions.” Note also the four-part series used: “castles and forts and harbours and race tracks.” In the sentence abundant use is also made of sound devices: alliteration—“wicked and wrong”—and rhyme—“crawling, sprawling.” And you will note the terminal rhythm of the sentence, after the long sweep of clauses and phrases: “as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, white-horsed and full of fishes,” with “white-horsed,” a repositioned adjective, acting as a brake on the rhythmical flow.

You would rarely write so splendiferous a sentence, of course. But you may want to try it, just to say that you have done it. Someday you might even want to use such a sentence if you find yourself wanting to recreate some vital, exuberant experience.

Copy the sentence by Dylan Thomas; then compose a similar sentence: long, detailed, descriptive; with great attention paid to balanced constructions, various forms of the series, and repositioned adjectives; and with special attention paid to bringing your sentence to a rhythmical and cadenced conclusion.

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Copy and Compose - Sentences€¦ · Web view6. 2 Tricolon. 7. 3 Asyndeton. 8. 4 Polysyndeton. 9. 5 Synonymia and Congeries. 10. 6 Merismos. 11. 7 Antithesis. 12. 8 Antimetabole